CalMatters has named a finalist in the public interest category of the prestigious National Magazine Awards

from Sonya BarzaCalMatters

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CalMatters is a finalist at the National Magazine Awards, one of journalism’s most prestigious awards, for an investigative reporter Anat Rubinthe story of, “The man who didn’t solve a murder.”

The National Magazine Awards recognize magazines and websites for editorial and visual excellence demonstrated through superior execution of editorial objectives, innovative techniques, remarkable initiative and imaginative design.

CalMatters is nominated in the public interest category, along with The Atlantic, Bloomberg Businessweek, ProPublica, WIRED, Bloomberg News and ESPN Digital. CalMatters is one of a handful of local journalism organizations recognized at the 61st National Magazine Awards. The winners will be announced and honored on May 19 in New York.

California Public Defender System Survey

Rubin’s investigation found that across the country, poor people accused of crimes were convicted without anyone looking at their side of the story. Yet the lack of public defense investigators has been largely absent from the national conversation surrounding criminal justice reform. This dialogue focuses on police and prosecutorial misconduct, but rarely on why there is no one on the other side to catch it.

Rubin’s story changed that.

She found that investigators who review police reports, visit crime scenes, pursue surveillance footage and interview witnesses are the best defense against wrongful convictions, but they are largely lacking in public defenders’ offices in California and across the country.

Her story shines a light on that failure with a compelling, elegantly woven narrative of a man who was accused of a heinous kidnapping and murder.

While local law enforcement celebrated solving a decades-old crime, a lone defense investigator on a shoestring budget unraveled the case. Rubin followed him as she made one discovery after another—an old photograph that proved a key witness was lying, lost records that contradicted the prosecutor’s account of the crime—to demonstrate how important defense investigators are, even as she presented data showing that most people accused of crimes won’t have access to them.

Rubin spoke to more than 45 people to report the story. She reviewed interrogation footage, law enforcement reports and interview transcripts spanning more than three decades. To understand the scope of the problem, she analyzed staffing data, incarceration rates and caseloads for California’s 58 counties.

At once a page-turning mystery about the disappearance of a 6-year-old boy from a remote Northern California logging town in 1976 and a methodical, data- and document-based investigation of contemporary systemic failures, Rubin’s story sets a new foundation for how we talk about public safety.

In addition to her compelling, narrative investigation, Rubin also published seven key takeaways from her story, “California fails to provide a vital protection against wrongful convictions.“

Rubin’s investigation was cited by researchers and lawmakers, including the state public defender, on the California Public Defender Association website and in the American Bar Association’s public defense news archive.

Now this is the first reference in an analysis of a California bill (AB 690), which will greatly increase defense investigations and create minimum standards across the country.

Six months later, Rubin published the second part of his series addressing the lack of key safeguards against wrongful conviction in California, “The WalMart of Public Defense: How Justice is Sold to the Lowest Bidder in Rural California.”

That investigation found that nearly half of California counties pay private attorneys and firms to represent poor people in criminal cases, and that most do so through what’s known as a “fixed-fee” contract, meaning they pay a fixed amount regardless of how many cases the attorneys handle or how much time they spend on each case. As Rubin details in his story, these arrangements so clearly disincentivize investigation and lawsuits that they are banned in other parts of the country. But they thrive in California.

She focuses the story on one firm with several such contracts across the state—a firm that has become known as the “WalMart of public defense” for its ubiquity and tactics.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.